Saturday Snippet: The Reapers by John Connolly

Whilst I had some issues with The Reapers, the story within the story of Louis' recruitment was superb and below is a short extract about the nature of racism in small-town, Southern US in the 1950s and 60s. It seems to hit the nail on the head to me.

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelled of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

The boy understood all of this instinctively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His mama hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.

Review of The Reapers by John Connolly, Hodder and Stoughton (2008)

Louis used to be a Reaper – an elite assassin – until he started to question who he was killing and why. His father-like handler, Gabriel, had let him walk away to start a new life with his partner, Angel. Now someone seems intent on seeking revenge for a life Louis cut short, Gabriel is back on the scene, and another former Reaper – Louie’s arch-nemesis, Bliss – has seemingly resurfaced. One of Louis’s businesses is attacked, then his apartment. A reclusive, wealthy business seems to know who the perpetrator is, a long time rival that he would also like neutralised. He points the path to a remote farmstead in upstate New York and when Gabriel is shot, Louis decides to follow the path to bring the situation to a resolution thus heading into the trap.

It had been some years since Louis and the man named Gabriel had met, but two men whose lives had once been so closely linked could never truly sever the bond between them. In a sense, it was Gabriel who had brought Louis into being, who had taken a boy with undeniable talents and forged him into a man who could be wielded as a weapon. It was to Gabriel that those who needed to avail themselves of Louis’s services had once come. He was the point of contact, the filter. His precise status was nebulous. He was a fixer, a facilitator. There was no blood on his hands, or none that one could see. Louis trusted him, to a degree. There was too much about Gabriel that was unknown, and unknowable. Still, Louis was conscious of something that resembled affection for his old master.

John Connolly’s writing flows along like a lyrical river; his narrative structure is excellent, tugging the reader from one sentence to the next. That said, whilst I like Connolly’s books - and this was no exception - The Reapers wasn’t in the same league as some of the other books in the series. The problem for me is that book is effectively the back story to Louis and Angel, the friends of his regular main character Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker – the former police detective who mourns the savage death of his wife and daughter and is inexorably drawn to trouble. The result is an in-depth explanation of Louis’s past in particular, to the extent that precious little happens for large chunks of the book. The description above is the entire plot – practically nothing happens. In the first 170 odd pages the only action is the attack on Louis’s garage business and his apartment and they only take up a few pages. Back story and in-depth characterization is fine, but as a reader I wanted story. When the action did arrive at the remote farmstead it was fairly predictable and lacked the kind of twists and turns that I normally associate with Connolly’s work. What saved this book was the quality of Connolly’s writing and the story within the story of Louis’s recruitment as a reaper, which was superb.